August 23, 2012

An occasional series highlighting local authors and their favorite ways to spend a Minnesota weekend.

1. What is a typical weekend for you?

Weekend? What? For most writers I know, when things are going well with a new book, the weekend is a great annoyance. Just one more distraction perpetrated by the real world (Thomas Mann also said this of the telegraph). But there’s a fine line between being in a writing groove and being a crabby stick-in-the mud husband or friend. Therefore, even if my writing is going never-better I try to take at least Sunday off and be cheerful and available even though my fabulous wife and fine friends know I’m faking it. And, if I have been suitably present and a good companion throughout a weekend, I often get back to my computer Sunday evening and position myself to start writing first thing Monday.

2. What are some of your favorite local Friday-night activities?

In the long days of summer, Friday night is a time to socialize and eat a piece of walleye somewhere. Come winter, I tend to stay home with my wife and kick back around the fireplace. My biorhythms are driven so much by the weather specifically and by seasons generally. In the summer, northern Minnesotans get “light drunk” and manically social from the long days; in winter, the converse happens—it feels like a great chore to leave home and be forced to talk to people. (Not a good sign–and time for more vitamin D and aerobic exercise.)

3. What/where do you eat on weekends? What’s a typical Sunday breakfast for you?

My small city of Bemidji has a limited number of good restaurants, so I get to know their menus well. I eat less meat these days not from ideological but more for digestive reasons (six ounces is a great plenty). I eat a fair amount of local fish, some of which I catch in the Mississippi River, which passes by my house (the Upper Mississippi, only twenty miles from the headwaters, and where the water is clear and clean). Sunday breakfast? Usually later and bigger, often with my wife’s made-from-scratch pancakes, bacon (rationed to once a week by my cheerful young physician), and maple syrup or jelly I’ve come by from friends or family.

4. What’s your weekend reading like?

Usually the newspapers and the New Yorkerwhich I’ve gotten behind on during the week. I seldom read books when I’m writing one, and since I’m usually writing one . . . . Well, you see the irony here.

5. What is your top Minnesota getaway?

Duluth is always great, especially for the Bayfront Blues Festival in August, though I also greatly enjoy the bluff country around Red Wing.